Comic Desolation

The cafe next door was open, as was the pub. I went for a walk around downtown before returning to the pub for a couple of pints of dark ale. Christmas Day afternoon. The Indian deli was open, Mickey D's was closed. There was a line in front of one of two cinema multiplexes, a beggar pestering film aficionados. A bookstore called The Comic Relief, located between a fantasy bookstore and the best bookstore in town or anywhere Half Price Books, was open, at least a half a dozen customers inside. The Subway sandwich shop was open too, as were the two drugstores in the neighbourhood. Beggars, the homeless, a group of teenage punks at the plaza in front of the subway station which was open.

I stepped inside the pub. A basketball game was playing on the flat screen TVs. Not one familiar face among the two dozen customers. A half dozen goth punks at the bar and at tables. The barmaid, Erica, is a goth punk herself, her T-shirt this afternoon said "DESOLATION". She was the only staff member in. What if there is trouble, I wondered. Well, her goth punk friends drinking free beer would come to her aid, I concluded. The kitchen was closed as usual on holidays, and Erica could only heat up and serve yesterday's chili, if anyone asked.

A bearded, four eyed man, looking like the stereotype of a computer geek, sitting at the bar, wore a green sweatshirt with the following, supposedly Irish poem on the back of it:

May the roof above us
never fall in
And we friends beneath
never fall out

Fair enough. A fat, aging, bleached blonde goth punk woman at the bar was giving me The Look. Oh, no. My drinking buddy Mike soon arrived and we had one of our deep conversations. What's the next rebellious look, we wondered. What can beat the lip, eyebrow and nose earrings for outrageousness? When he gave up hippiedom, Mike said, he only had to cut his hair. How will they go straight with tattooes on every finger of the knuckle? And what about music, I asked? In the past century, it's come from Scott Joplin and Louis Armstrong, both classically trained, to the reductionist anti-music of the illiterate rap "artists". What's next? Good questions. We wished each other a Merry Christmas, I stepped out and drove home.